


Coffee Dates and Other Mysteries

by ketchupcrisp



Series: (That Would Be) Enough Timestamps [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bonding, Brief mention of non-sexual age play, Communication, Everyone Is Poly Because Avengers, Gen, Ladies of Marvel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 10:59:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12252981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ketchupcrisp/pseuds/ketchupcrisp
Summary: Pepper Potts and Jane Foster meet for coffee. This is not as terrifying a prospect as Jane first imagines.





	Coffee Dates and Other Mysteries

**Author's Note:**

> So this story is set after the events of (That Would Be) Enough, and immediately before its sequel, Domestic Life (Was Never Quite My Style). It should help give some context to Jane's upcoming presence in the latter. 
> 
> No warnings I can think of except for a brief mention of non-sexual age play; in this verse, that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

The instant Jane steps into the coffee shop, she knows she should have chosen a different shirt. It’s a Starbucks, which she’s been lead by popular culture to believe is the land of freelance writers and other misfits, but she hadn’t really taken into account the fact that the nearest location to Stark Industries is going to be full of business people in suits that cost more than, well, pretty much everything she owns. Including the one currently being worn by Pepper Potts. Who looks about eight feet tall and flawless in a grey suit with a structured yellow blouse and accents. Still, she greets Jane, standing there in a Snoopy t-shirt and her second-best jeans, without a hint of snobbery. 

“It’s great to see you Dr. Foster. Thanks for agreeing to meet me. What can I get you to drink?” Oh god. That’s the other thing about coffee places that aren’t attached to gas stations or seedy diners: you have to know how to order things at them, and it’s like a whole other language. Biting back a slightly hysterical laugh, Jane wonder if she can adapt Thor’s Allspeak for these kinds of situations. Might come in handy for some of the fancy restaurants Tony insists on taking them to every once in a while, too. 

“Uh, just…whatever you’re having?” Pepper probably knows this request is borne entirely out of Jane’s own ignorance, but she’s kind enough to avoid saying so, and few moments later she returns to their table with something that looks kind of like—

“Hot chocolate,” Pepper smiles. “I’m trying very hard to avoid falling into the trap of over-reliance on caffeine. I don’t always succeed, mind, but I’m a lot less jittery than I used to be.” Jane nods and takes a grateful sip of the sweet drink while she tries to remember how to make small talk with non-science people. 

“So is uh…are things going well? With SI?” 

“For the most part. There’s little dramas all the time, mostly because half the board of directors are fools with more money than sense. Relics from when Stane controlled things who still think I have no right to be there and that SI needs to go back to making weapons despite the fact that our profits are at all time high. I had to literally ban the phrase ‘well actually’ in the board room, because there are only so many times I can hear that from men in a day before my eyes threaten to roll entirely back in my head. I imagine you face some of the same challenges in your field?” Jane grins. 

“A lot less now that I work for SHIELD, but yeah. In grad school, this one guy tried to steal my work under the guise of having some kind of romantic interest in me, but he was about as subtle as a brick. So I conveniently left a whole report worth of falsified and inaccurate data on my coffee table, and he was never taken seriously in the field ever again.” Pepper laughs, and it’s not a polite, quiet sound; her whole body shakes with it, and every once in a while a noise almost like a snort sneaks through. Jane instantly feels about a thousand times more comfortable in the other woman’s company, and they pass several enjoyable minutes trading war stories and revenge strategies. 

“And I imagine convincing Thor not to step in when some of this happens is a challenge all on its own? When Tony and I were dating I had to convince him more than once that showing up at someone’s house in the middle of the night in the Iron Man armour was not an appropriate response to someone pissing me off. I still have to convince him of that actually.” There doesn’t seem to be any hint of anger or grief when Pepper talks about her ex, and Jane wonders if she could ever be that cool, working and remaining close friends with someone she used to be involved with. 

“There’s been…incidents, yes. But for the most part Thor trusts me to handle the petty things. In exchange, I let him handle the ‘metal guys coming down from the sky to shoot at me and Phil Coulson stealing my gear’ kind of stuff. It’s a good system.” Pepper grins. 

“So it’s working out for you guys then?” Instantly, Jane has to reel in her high-school-esque impulse to demand to know what Pepper has heard. She compensates with what she hopes is a long and relaxed-looking sip of her hot chocolate. “I know you and I don’t know one another that well, and if you want me to butt out I will. I just ask because…well, there aren’t a lot of women in their inner-circle. It’s hard and ultimately I couldn’t handle it, not as a romantic partner anyway.” 

“If you’re trying to convince me to break up with my boyfriend—” Jane begins, her respect and awe of Pepper warring with her admittedly hot temper. 

“I’m not. Not at all. The opposite, actually. I wanted to try to offer support, in whatever form you might need or want it.” 

“…oh. I—that’s kind of you. We’re…doing fine, for the most part. I think sometimes he wishes I would move into the Tower with the rest of them.” 

“But you don’t want to?” Pepper asks, with no hint of judgement or concern. With so many of her nearest and dearest convinced there’s something deeply wrong with Jane for not already being married to Thor and pregnant with his kids, it’s a refreshing change of pace. 

“I…I’m not sure. But no, I don’t think I do. I like visiting the Tower; the team is always incredibly sweet and supportive, and I mean robotics isn’t exactly my area but I could spend weeks just studying JARIVS alone.” Pepper grins. 

“He is remarkable. I’m sure if you wanted, Tony would be willing to share his code or give you any other information you require. He loves you, you know; he actually keeps a running list of topics he wants to discuss with you when you visit.” That sounds…well, that sounds like Tony. 

“I do the same, actually. It’s not every day a girl get to hang out with people on his level, or Banner’s. It’s like science-Christmas every time the three of us get together. But I don’t…I can’t see myself living there full-time any more than I would want to drink eggnog every day.” She’s never said this as definitely or clearly as she has just now, even to herself, and there’s something almost freeing about the admission that she doesn’t want to live with her boyfriend, at least not right now. 

“Afraid the novelty will wear off?”

“More like…I don’t know. They’re kind of overwhelming, aren’t they?” Pepper just sips her own hot chocolate, allowing Jane time to gather her thoughts. “I love Thor and I love the team, but when I’m in the Tower it’s like I forget there’s even a world that exists outside of it. They’re—total and all encompassing, like an eclipse or an endless list of dependent variables and I feel like I’d get…”

“Lost?” Pepper offers gently. It feels deeply shameful to nod, to admit that she feels like having her entire sense of self re-defined by her relationship to and with a truly remarkable group of people would be a bad thing, but Jane has faced down The Destroyer and Phil Coulson within the same week before, damn it, so she nods. To her surprise, Pepper almost beams at her. “You’re so young, I think I really underestimate you sometimes Jane. You’re so much further ahead at this than I was—I didn’t know I felt lost until I was completely drowning.” 

“It’s hard to imagine you feeling like that about anything,” Jane replies honestly. Maybe a bit too honestly. Pepper Potts does not need to go that Jane has bordering-on fangirl feelings about her. 

“Well I did. Tony was in unimaginable distress, and at first I tried to stay. I called in Phil and he called the team and I thought we could work together and it would be okay, but then Loki’s spell happened and I just…broke. I left without knowing if Tony was ever going to be okay again because I felt like if I didn’t leave then I would just fade away and be nothing but an extension of him and his needs.” She smiles a little sadly then. “It’s hard sometimes to see how happy he is with them, to wonder if I had just hung on if maybe we might have made it. But I don’t think we could’ve. I don’t think I could have been with someone whose heart is split into so many different pieces. But it doesn’t bother you, does it? The way Thor feels about them?” 

As often happens when Jane is posed with complex questions, her mind fills in a branching field of responses and their most probably implications. She could lie, pretend to be one hundred percent fine with all of it; this would maybe make her feel cool in front of Pepper, but it would also violate the general trend of honest disclosure in this conversation. She could simplify things, just say that she’s _not_ okay with Thor’s heart and attention being split so many different ways, but that would be just as much a lie, and Pepper is not the type of person who seems to need the nuance scrubbed out of her discussions. That leaves her with the truth, which is…ugh. 

“I mean, whether it’s because we’re trained to want monogamy or whatever, there are times it feels like we’re doing it wrong. Days when it would be nice to just come home to his stupid huge bear hugs, and dinner on the stove. Maybe a dog or something. It was what I imagined when we first, when I first realized I had feelings for him. But within, what, a few days of us meeting and falling in love, he chose to shatter the Bifrost knowing it meant maybe never seeing me again. And I don’t blame him; I wouldn’t have wanted him to do any different. But he and I have never really had the luxury of belonging just to each other, and part of what I love about him would be…diminished if he wasn’t someone who loves so much and so many.” She thinks, then, of Tony, of what she knows that Thor offers Tony. It’s odd to be privy to something so personal about Tony Stark that Pepper doesn’t have access to, but she imagines the age play the team participates in is one of things Pepper actively needs to not know; it’s part of the boundaries she and Tony have painstakingly re-drawn around their lives. “And if I can’t have all of him…well, I like that we’re equals in that way at least, that there are parts of my life that he’s really only tangential to. It mightn't be how the love story is supposed to go, but it works for us more often than it doesn’t.” 

“I feel like that should be the official Avengers team and supporters motto,” Pepper muses, finishing her hot chocolate with a flourish that leaves dots of whipped cream across her upper lip. “It works more often than it doesn’t.” 

“We’ll get t-shirts made. Darcy, my assistant, would certainly love it. She sleeps in one of those gag shirts they made after Hulk’s PR video.” 

“Darcy, huh? She should join us for the next coffee date, what do you say?” The casual mention of a ‘next’ meeting with this woman, perhaps the only person in Jane’s life who understands what it is to love and constantly risk losing a superhero (while also trying to have a damn life of your own) spreads warmth through Jane’s bones that has nothing to do with the hot chocolate. Even if the thought of Darcy meeting Pepper is borderline terrifying.

**Author's Note:**

> What'd you think? I know comic Jane fairly well and MCU Jane...well, not that well at all, especially because I've only seen the first of the Thor movies. But I welcome your feedback, and I hope it'll help contextualize Jane's role in the (That Would Be) Enough verse.


End file.
